[postgis-users] How to import/export PostGIS Raster data? Tools?

[Pierre Racine]

>The GDAL toolkit will NOT be delivered in PostGIS 2.x package -- well at
>least not to my knowledge.  What I meant to say was that just the
>libgdal.so, libgdal.dll PostGIS will have a dependency on, but
>There is technically no requirement to package the accompanying tools --
>e.g. gdal_translate, gdal_warp etc. though this may change.

Exact. This should not change. People often confuse GDAL the library with GDAL the image processing toolkit. When an application is dependent on GDAL it meens only the library (dll or so), not all the tools provided with the toolkit.

>That does bring up an interesting question though getting back to why we
>even need a raster2pgsql?
>The main advantage I see of a raster2pgsql is that it can generate a raw sql
>file which GDAL doesn't currently do, though behind the scenes it does do
>the same stuff but just goes direct.  That should actually be a feature of
>GDAL I think.

Then, to be fair, you also have to ask why we even need a shp2pgsql... Your answer should apply to raster2pgsql. I asked this question to Paul last september. I would let him answer it...

It's true that PostGIS raster is a bit different in that it comes with the GDAL library anyway. We would just have to deliver the GDAL tools and we would not need raster2pgsql (and shp2pgsql) anymore. We would just have to maintain the GDAL driver (this is all IF the driver would be able to WRITE to pgsql which is not yet the case).

Pierre